Tip for Junior Programmers: Tracing Flow Through Code

Learning how code “hangs together” is crucial for all programmers. And it’s not that difficult.

Most software has an entry point, though it varies depending on the language or framework. Find and understand that entry point.

From there just follow the code. In procedural and object-oriented languages you’ll mainly be dealing with IF statements, SWITCH statements, calls to functions and calls to objects with properties and methods.

Watch what is called. Look at the parameters being passed into methods or class constructors.

Look at how variables are manipulated. Consider the scopes of variables and class properties – are the private to a function or class, or are the public? Are function parameters passed by value or by reference?

And think about namespaces – from the variables and functions that sit in the global namespace through to those nested under specific namespaces.

Functions will sometimes seem to be in a global namespace but are actually implicitly at a deeper namespace level thanks to using or include statements in the file (e.g. in C# and VB.NET).

PRO TIP: Make Find All (usually Ctrl+F) your best friend. If you come across a function or variable and don’t know where it’s defined or what it’s used for, any decent IDE with allow you to perform a “Find All” and list out all occurrences of it. Use that to trace the use of the variable/function.

But the most important thing you can do as a programmer is: take the time to read and understand the code. The more years of experience you have the easier and more intuitive it becomes, but always it is important. Learn how to follow the flows, intuit the structure and find where functionality lives.